In these situations it can be helpful to use some kind of scale or domain reference.
"We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, and we think it could change the world"
vs
"We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that should really fire up geologists"
vs
"We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that gets us closer to understanding the history of Mars"
Set a level of expectation.
"This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good..."
There's life everywhere... we just haven't found it yet.
What? A martian running in front of the camera would work. A rover not sent by earth. A little house on the... sand. Big ol skeleton of a unicorn... Seriously, you have no imagination.
You hurt me. Don’t be so mean.
The 'results' from missions are stories such as this one and other discoveries.
It is in NASA's interest to overplay and overvalue the importance of discoveries from each of these missions.
It is sad that NASA has to play this game, since discovering nothing with Mars Pathfinder would be just as interesting to science as discovering something, but it wouldn't make the mission easy to justify the next time they go and ask for a billion dollars.
They are NOT on a tight budget - even with the entire shuttle fleet shut down, they're spending more than they have in all but a few years since 1970.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
$17 BILLION may not sound like much in the insane scale of other federal spending, but it's a vast amount by any other scale.
If the spokesman for the collaboration can't say, "Nope, we haven't seen anything interesting. It's all boring, please go home.", then the journalists know that something's up and the hoopla starts.
Scientists like to talk. It's our job. Collaborations are only partially optimized to contain leaks. I sincerely doubt that any part of the rover team would like to stir up hoopla when they aren't certain about results.
It would be exactly what you want when you know what you know is true, and might leak anyways, but you are stuck doing the work to add a sigma to the results.
Unlikely. Scientists don't normally work this way (not to say "never"). If true it would in essence grant an exclusive right to follow a non-story. But I doubt that NPR actually has any kind of exclusive. It's more likely that only NPR is willing to publish what is in essence a background on a story, not a story per se.
For comparison, consider what happened before the Higgs announcement last summer. Because the circumstances were very different and the stakes much higher, everyone was publishing speculations about what would be announced, in advance of knowing anything at all. In that case also, there was no exclusive, but the level of publishing enthusiasm was higher.
If there are signs of life on Mars it's unlikely that we'll be able to see it with any imager on the rover, but we might be able to detect its chemical signature. The sample analysis instrument is a gas chromatograph connected to a laser spectrometer and a mass spectrometer. What happens is that a sample will be vaporized and then pushed through a long column. The column is designed so that different molecules will have a different speed through the column and thus will come out at different times. Then each of those parts of the sample (which should be comprised primarily of one molecule) is passed into the spectrometers, which can identify its molecular structure. This can determine the chemical makeup of minerals, but it can also identify complex organic molecules such as the components of cells or perhaps things like cellulose or lignin and so forth.
Them saying they have found something big leads to speculation, speculation that might paint the image of an discovery much bigger than what was actually discovered. Scientists are understandably enthusiastic about this, but they also have to keep in mind that when they just use words to describe the importance of the discovery without naming the discovery itself, it’s easy for them to get it very, very wrong. Something for the history books for them might well be something most people really couldn’t care less about.
I think the adult thing of saying that it is possible you discovered x but you still need confirmation may well work, if you know how to frame it correctly. But whatever you do, don’t say anything about history books, not before you are really sure.
Alternatively you shut up and say nothing to the public until you are sure.
This whole “We have discovered something huge but we can’t tell you what until we are really sure!” seems very misguided to me.
I think this is just a case of bad PR, not bad science reporting or anything like that.